Tony Skyrme
Tony Skyrme Roy Hilton ( born December 5, 1922 in Lewisham, Kent; † 25 June 1987) was a British theoretical physicist who worked on nuclear physics.
Life and work
Skyrme attended Eton College from 1936 to 1940 and went on a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduating in 1943 he worked with Rudolf Peierls in the British atomic bomb project (Tube Alloy Project), where he attacked especially the experimenters about with geometric corrections for measuring equipment under the arms, the gas diffusion examined in uranium enrichment and an analytical formula for the equation of state of air developed in the pressure and temperature fields after a nuclear explosion. He was also a member of the British Mission to Los Alamos in 1944, where he was involved in the calculations of the Implosionsprozesses the plutonium bomb. In 1946 he received his doctorate with results from in Cambridge in Peierls ( Hydrodynamical theory and the reaction zone in high explosive ) and was then a member of the theory group of Peierls in Birmingham. In 1949, he was with Victor Weisskopf at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) and then 1949/50, the Institute for Advanced Study. 1950 to 1961 he was at the nuclear research center AERE ( Atomic Energy Research Establishment) in Harwell. From 1954 he was there leader of the group of Theoretical Nuclear Physics, where, among other things, John Bell worked (as well as the head of the theoretical division Brian Flowers, JP Elliott, Franz Mandl, AM Lane, Walter Marshall). 1962 to 1964 he was at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, after he had visited Malaysia on a trip around the world. From 1964 he was the successor of Peierls as a professor of theoretical physics in Birmingham.
Skyrme found an example in Hartree -Fock approximations or shell model calculations much used parameterization of the effective nuclear interaction ( Skyrme potential) and developed a topological soliton model of the nucleon, the ( non-linear classical field corresponding to the exchange of mesons of the nuclear interaction ) emanating from Bosonenfeldern to fermions ( nucleons ) to model than the solitons ( skyrmions ). It was especially popular in the early 1980s with the work of Edward Witten and Bag models. Within the framework of the shell model, he showed the ability to derive other descriptive models of the nucleus ( an alpha particle model with J. Perring ), and showed the elimination of "spurious states" ( unphysical states) in the shell model with Elliott. He also examined the muon -induced nuclear fusion, applied the Brueckner theory of nuclear matter on the derivation of spin -orbit interaction in the shell model and examined collective nuclear models. Skyrme was reluctant to publish his works, many important works (such as the quantum-mechanical three-body problem in nuclear scattering) remained unpublished.
In 1949 he married the experimental nuclear physicist Dorothy Millest.
In 1985 he was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society.
Writings
- Collected works of T.Skyrme with commentary, World Scientific, 1994 ( comment Gerry Brown), with description of his work by Richard Dalitz.